MLB's good baseball deal

The opposition to MLB’s deal that will allow Cuban pro ballplayers to sign with big league clubs without fleeing Cuba and without the need to establish residency elsewhere, is in part understandable: If you support the embargo, you want to limit any financial flows to Cuba.

But I suspect there’s more to it. In Miami, some are surely rubbed the wrong way at the idea that Cuban players could play here without emigrating, without effectively breaking with the system, without joining el exilio.

It certainly shows that those who want to block the deal are not interested in encouraging some positive changes in Cuba that made it possible: the ability for Cubans to travel and return, and the ability of pro athletes to earn market-based pay abroad and return to Cuba with those earnings. They are not being called desertores anymore.

How do Cuban ballplayers see the deal that Senator Rubio wants to block?

Look at the math from a Cuban player’s point of view. Say he signs a one-year, $2 million deal (half the MLB average).

A “release fee” of $400,000 goes to Cuban baseball – paid by the club, not the player.

If IRS applies U.S. tax (30%), that’s $600,000 to Uncle Sam, and the player pockets $1.4 million.

Cuba decided recently to tax that income at 4%, not the 50% marginal rate applied to, say, a private restaurant or bed-and-breakfast with taxable income above $2000.

Senator Rubio complains about the “new tax” Cuba is imposing (4%), but if it applied the 50% rate on the books since 1996, the player would pay more than ten times more!

After paying the 4%, the player is left with $1.344 million – more than 2,600 times his salary in the Cuban national league.

More on all this in this column in Cuba Standard.

Yasiel Puig, livin' large in LA

He’s 23 years old, he's hitting .326, he has homered in three of the last four games (video of last night’s is here), his manager is thrilled with his maturation as a hitter, he continues to amaze in the field with his glove, his arm, or his crashes into the wall, and last night was Yasiel Puig Bobblehead Night in Chavez Ravine, with his Mom there to throw out the first pitch.

Also, he’s generating a little controversy about The Way the Game Is Played because when he hits a homer he gets a little exuberant and some pitchers don’t like it. Can you blame him?

Odds and ends

• Granma published the text of the foreign investment law today.

• In the Mariel economic zone, as in foreign investment projects in general, workers are hired and paid through an employment agency.  Payment is made in hard currency, the agency keeps most of the money and pays the workers a normal Cuban wage.  Foreign businesses then make side payments to the workers to raise their wages and productivity, which is why jobs with foreign businesses are sought-after.  Trabajadores reports that in the Mariel economic zone, the agency will no longer have a “revenue-collecting” function and will pay workers 80 percent of the wage negotiated between the foreign business and the agency.

• Reuters on Cuba’s new private non-farm cooperatives; more than 450 are now operating in the program’s “experimental” phase.

• Granma: the new labor code makes Good Friday a holiday in Cuba, this week and permanently.

• A granddaughter recounts an interview that her grandfather Clark Hewitt Galloway conducted with Fidel Castro in 1959.

• Dodger phenom Yasiel Puig’s flight from Cuba was harrowing, and still is so, recounted in detail by Los Angeles Magazine in English and Spanish.

Odds and ends

·         As the 15^th round of Colombia peace talks proceed in Havana, Juventud Rebelde gives ample coverage to the Colombian government’s complaint that the guerrillas are dragging their feet and trying to add extraneous items to the agreed agenda.  Cuba acts as “guarantor” in the talks.

·         Herald: Panamanian officials say that some of the aircraft engines on the North Korean freighter seized in Panama were “brand new.”  They also say that “friends overseas” tell them that Cuba and North Korea have an arms trade agreement of uncertain scope; that the North Korean crewmen in detention are happy campers (air conditioning, clothes, food, cigarettes, time for soccer every day); and that while the crew have spoken to investigators they have declined to sign statements.

·         An “updating” of Cuba’s criminal justice procedures took effect October 1 and was explained by officials on a Mesa Redonda program.  Relatively minor offenses that had been handled in provincial courts will now be heard in municipal courts.  For certain minor offenses prosecutors will have discretion to impose administrative penalties (fines) rather than go to court to seek a prison sentence, although a defendant can insist on a court trial if he wishes.  The impact seems to be a streamlining and a shift of caseload to lower courts and, depending on how prosecutors use their discretion, lesser penalties for minor criminal offenses.

·         Canadian professor Steven Kimber makes the case for the Cuban Five in the Washington Post.

·         AP on the clash between el exilio and more recent Cuban immigrants.

·         Who’s investing in Cuba?  A smart B-School student figures it out at the bar at the Hotel Nacional.

·         Granma on the art of base stealing through the years.

·         EFE: The family of Oswaldo Paya, now living in Florida, acquires Spanish citizenship.

·         AP: A ceremony in the Colon cemetery in Havana to commemorate the terrorist downing of the Cubana airliner in Barbados in 1976.

·         In the National Interest, a look at the past and the future of Cuba’s intelligence services, “punching above their weight.”  The authors link to this interesting U.S. assessment (pdf): “Cuban Subversive Activities in Latin America, 1959-1968.”

·         In an advice column for Congress, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson owns up to his bumbling in Havana in 2011.

Irrepressible Puig

In American baseball, there’s such a thing as The Way the Game is Played, which doesn’t include celebrating your own home run exuberantly, thereby showing up a pitcher, disrespecting him, and making him a little sharper or angrier for your next at-bat.

So what?

Yasiel Puig of the Dodgers broke out of an 0-for-10 series slump with a drive to deep right last night, which he celebrated exuberantly as a home run as he made his way slowly to first.  When it didn’t clear the wall he turned on the jets and made it to third standing up in about two seconds, there to celebrate his RBI triple. 

There’s a lot of harrumphing going on about Puig’s antics in the baseball world today, which LA Times writer Bill Shaikin puts in very good perspective here.  I think you have to be a Cardinals fan or a real grump to be down on this kid from Cienfuegos today. 

Look at the video below, taken from the stands, and ask yourself who wouldn’t want to be a Dodger fan today?